In the state of the art, daughter cards in an electronic card drawer are independent and are mounted in the drawer from the front thereof.
At their back ends, the daughter cards have respective back connectors, and at their front ends they have respective front connectors.
The daughter cards are suitable for being plugged in manually into connectors disposed on a mother board at the back of the drawer.
The function of the mother board is to establish electrical connections between the daughter cards.
Once the daughter cards have been plugged in at the back of the drawer, loose cabling can be connected manually at the front of the drawer to the daughter cards by means of connectors provided with plugs.
An electronic card drawer having that architecture has the following drawbacks:
it requires quite a long time to extract the entire drawer since it is necessary to undo all of the connectors located at the front; PA1 it occupies a large amount of volume because of the presence of the cable-engaging plugs, because a large amount of clearance space needs to be given to the cables and the plugs, and because of the extra amounts of cable length necessary for moving in that clearance; PA1 each time a drawer is extracted, the cables at the front of the drawer are subjected to twisting which can give rise to the cabling being damaged during various operations of handling the drawer; PA1 the front connectors need to be removed and test connectors placed on the front face of the drawer; PA1 it can be difficult to see indicators disposed on the fronts of the daughter cards; PA1 it is difficult to ground shielded cables because of the lack of room in the plugs and because the connections outside the plugs require considerable lengths of cable, thereby giving rise to high impedances; and PA1 high extra cost. PA1 said back output connectors disposed inside a drawer support and secured to the back face of said drawer support; PA1 said electronic cards disposed between said back output connectors and said front card connectors; and PA1 said mother board disposed close to the front face of said drawer. PA1 output cabling is disposed at the back of said bay; and PA1 associated output connectors are disposed inside said bay and are secured to the back face of said bay.
Document WO 91/10343 relates to a drawer for electronic cards, with the electronic cards being connected to a mother board by means of card connectors, and with the electronic cards being connected to output connectors.
Such a prior art drawer presents the same drawbacks as those mentioned above.